feel her bend her head to my chest as I gently touch the satin
hair? Why do I do this? If I am damned I must want to kill her, I
must want to make her nothing but food for a cursed existence,
because being damned I must hate her.
“And when I thought of this, I saw Babette’s face contorted with
hatred when she had held the lantern waiting to light it, and I saw
Lestat in my mind and hated him, and I felt, yes, damned and this
is hell, and in that instant I had bent down and driven hard into
her soft, small neck and, hearing her tiny cry, whispered even as I
felt the hot blood on my lips, ‘It’s only for a moment and there’ll
be no more pain.’ But she was locked to me, and I was soon
incapable of saying anything. For four years I had not savored a
human; for four years I hadn’t really known; and now I heard her
heart in that terrible rhythm, and such a heart—not the heart of a
man or an animal, but the rapid, tenacious heart of the child,
beating harder and harder, refusing to die, beating like a tiny st
beating on a door, crying, ‘I will not die, I will not die, I cannot
die, I cannot die.…’ I think I rose to my feet still locked to her, the
heart pulling my heart faster with no hope of cease, the rich blood
rushing too fast for me, the room reeling, and then, despite
myself, I was staring over her bent head, her open mouth, down
through the gloom at the mother’s face; and through the half-mast
lids her eyes gleamed at me as if they were alive! I threw the
child down. She lay like a jointless doll. And turning in blind
horror of the mother to ee, I saw the window lled with a
familiar shape. It was Lestat, who backed away from it now
laughing, his body bent as he danced in the mud street. ‘Louis,
Louis,’ he taunted me, and pointed a long, bone-thin nger at me,
as if to say he’d caught me in the act. And now he bounded over
the sill, brushing me aside, and grabbed the mother’s stinking
body from the bed and made to dance with her.”
“Good God!” whispered the boy.
“Yes, I might have said the same,” said the vampire. “He
stumbled over the child as he pulled the mother along in
widening circles, singing as he danced, her matted hair falling in